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Topic: Lazarus and GTK2 x GTK3 x GTK4 x GTK5 (Read 1205 times)

Just curious, how Lazarus community sees GTK+ movement through GTK4, stabilizing GTK3 and the future end of life (EOL) of GTK2, as happened to GTK1?

-----------------------------------Firefox 59 Is Dropping GTK2 SupportWritten by Michael Larabel in Mozilla on 13 January 2018

Now that Firefox's GTK3 support is finally into shape, Firefox 59 will be doing away with GTK2 tool-kit support.The latest Firefox Nightly code ahead of Firefox 59.0 (not the upcoming Firefox 58) will drop GTK2 support. As of this week the GTK2 tool-kit code was removed from Firefox with the GTK3 support proving to be suitable.Bug 1278282 that was opened two years ago to remove the GTK2 code once the GTK3 support was mature is now resolved. Dropping the GTK2-specific code while keeping in the code relevant to GTK3 support lightened the Firefox codebase by just over one thousand lines of code.Firefox 59 has also been working on an improved screenshot tool, better security in the wake of Meltdown and Spectre, and other developer improvements. Firefox 58 is due to be released on 23 January while Firefox 59 should arrive on 13 March.https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-59-Does-Away-With-GTK2

Versioning and long term stability promise in GTK+GTK+ Development BlogAllan, Posted on September 1, 2016

This month, the GTK+ team will publish the first in a series of long-term stable releases. This will make GTK+ more predictable and reliable, while not inhibiting future GTK+ improvements.These plans are a result of discussions held with a variety of stakeholders since initial plans were made at the GTK+ hackfest in Toronto last June.

The new versioning scheme

The new GTK+ versioning scheme is a modification of the “semantic versioning” scheme that we have followed until now. Once a new major stable release has been published, the development cycle starts and we will:- update the pkg-config file to a new major version, to allow GNOME developers to target the new API during development- keep the existing major version at the same number- update the minor version to 90 to indicate a development release

"Those wanting to help out with GTK4 development can work on creating custom demos/applications, porting existing GTK2/GTK3 applications to GTK4, converting custom widgets to the new APIs, and testing. If all goes well, GTK+ 4.0 could be released in 2018.This GTK+ 4.0 update for those not in Brno can be found via this PDF slide deck."https://mclasen.fedorapeople.org/gtk4-devconf2018.pdf

I would really like to see somebody working on the bindings for GTK3 or even GTK4! It is my graphical toolkit of choice and using Lazarus / FPC to create modern desktop applications would be a dream! GTK2 now looks really acient and there are many features in GTK3 that I want to use with FPC!

"The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.

It sounds yet to be decided whether for their "fall" target if they would try aligning the GTK+ 4.0 release with the GNOME 3.30 milestone this September or come after that point.

Following the GTK+ 4.0 release, it sounds like they will start working on GTK+ 5.0 right away."

GNOME --"After adding the Mir back-end for the GTK+ 3.16 cycle, GTK+ 4.0 is dropping this back-end for the Canonical-developed display server.

The Mir back-end has been removed from the latest GTK+ code. This clears out about 6,500 lines of code from the tool-kit's codebase. The removal of the Mir back-end is coming since Mir has been focusing on Wayland protocol support to which GTK+ has more mature Wayland support than Mir. Since Mir's change of focus last year and the work the past number of months, the Wayland support on Mir has become more viable."

GNOME --"Yesterday I wrote about GTK4 dropping the Mir display back-end in favor of the Wayland back-end. Additionally, the "big GDK lock" was also stripped out. The latest is some additional cleaning to lighten the tool-kit code-base by about seven thousand lines of code.

The latest significant cleanup is removing old GTK 2.x/3.x version references in the code and documentation. By dropping these old version annotations, GTK+ 4.0 saw nearly eight thousand lines of code removed but just over one thousand new insertions across more than 400 files.

The cleanup is quite a bit bigger than many would have assumed for simply dropping mentions of old GTK versions.

GNOME developers are hoping to release GTK+ 4.0 this fall. Besides lots of clean-ups, GTK+ 4.0 introduces the Vulkan renderer, the GTK Scene Kit finally materializing, OpenGL improvements, various API improvements, and a ton of other work. Some of the GTK+ 4.0 changes are outlined via the road-map Wiki page."